December 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

That the "anarcho"-capitalist is trying to have it both ways.
by mattd 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/secF6.html Are so-called anarcho-capitalists really statists? Discuss.

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MS DRM OS
by Michael Motyka 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

Could someone who knows more than I do explain to me why this MS "IP" is anything other than making the owner of a PC unable to have root access to their own hardware/OS? If so it seems to be an idea unworthy of protection from lawyers and men with guns. Mike

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Concerts to raise money for battle against record companies
by Graham Lally 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

From Slashdot... http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/1348770p-1418333c.html [...] "The Recording Artists Coalition, a trade group representing more than 100 entertainers, has booked several sites in Los Angeles for the Feb. 26 concerts. "Money raised from the concerts will help fund an offensive against the major record labels for allegedly denying musicians a share of royalty earnings. [...] "``It's about time for artists to take control of their work and how it is presented to our fans,'' said Dexter Holland of the band Offspring, which will perform as part of the effort." [...] .g -- "Sometimes I use google instead of pants."

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Nazi dwarf,tom cruise,in singapore.Scientologist City.
by mattd 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

http://theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/12/19/FFXKJ94KCVC.html Tom Cruise says Hollywood will stop internet thieves Wednesday 19 December 2001 People who download movies off the internet are "thieves" who threaten the potential of the film industry, Tom Cruise said yesterday. People who support fascistic *religions TM ,should be struck by cruise missiles says proffr safe in nicoles own country,au http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Scientology_cases/20010622_eff_henson_pr.html

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Wired on e-gold
by Nomen Nescio 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

The January, 2002 issue of Wired has an article on e-gold, the online payment system founded by retired oncologist Douglas Jackson. Much of the article discusses e-gold's misguided effort to link up with Islamic fundamentalists who want to overthrow capitalism. They are setting up a spinoff, e-dinar, for use in the Muslim world. This brilliant marketing tactic is not going too well even by the modest standards of what passes for success around the e-gold offices, especially since 9/11. Of course the cypherpunk interest in e-gold revolves around its vaunted privacy protection. The article provides a much-needed dose of reality to those who still harbor fantasies that e-gold is interested in protecting the privacy of its customers. Those who participated in the fractious debates between e-gold founders and its customers in the early days will remember the company's sniff of dismissal at "elite ivovy-tower" arguments in favor of its privacy. Alaskan attorney Daniel J. Boone in particular made a number of principled appeals to e-gold officials to hold to their early promises of privacy protection, to no avail. Here is what the article has to say about the use of e-gold by pyramid schemes (euphemistically caled HYIPs, high-yield investment programs): > For his part, Jackson vigorously denies HYIPs account for anything > approaching a substantial portion of e-gold traffic. "These are > piddly-ass little things," he says. "When you actually run one of > these things down, they're pathetic." Still, he concedes, they're a PR > liability, and he and his staff have been working hard to squeeze them > out of the system. They've instituted "know your customer" rules to > identify suspected swindlers, and they've cooperated amicably with law > enforcement. When SEC staffers came to G&SR's offices last May to review > the accounts of one of the biggest e-gold schemes ever - the self-styled > "Christian-based humanitarian organization" E-Biz Ventures, shut down > after allegedly inflicting losses of $8.5 million on investors - they > were welcomed with coffee, bagels, and a conference room of their own. > J. Chris Condren, the attorney charged with recovering E-Biz investors' > money, has only good things to say about e-gold. "They've answered > every question we've asked them, they've responded to every subpoena, > every request for information." Jackson is lying about the unimportance of HYIPs. Independent e-gold vendors estimate 30, 50 or as much as 90 percent of e-gold transactions go into pyramid scams, and the largest single holding in the system belongs to a shut-down Ponzi. But more importantly, we can plainly see the company's anti-privacy policies in action. Any business has a basic philosophy, implicit or explicit, and their actions reflect and reveal that philosophy. Jackson and e-gold only pay lip service to the goals of financial privacy. Their actions reveal their true feelings: that privacy just gets in the way of business success. It seems hard to believe that a currency which aims to attract libertarians and "gold bugs" would put customer privacy at such a low priority. And no doubt these policies account in part for the slow growth rate of the currency compared to successful ventures like PayPal. Nevertheless this should be a cautionary tale for any payment system which purports to offer privacy as a selling point. Criminals love privacy, they love anonymity. Remailer operators soon find that a substantial majority of the messages they send contain nothing but harrassment and threats. Few customers use anonymity services for positive purposes, to protect their privacy while engaging in legitimate activities. With most people, if they have nothing to hide, they don't hide it. Only paranoids and extremists will adopt anonymity technologies without nefarious purposes in mind. Anyone proposing to offer new services for privacy and anonymity should be prepared to deal with the onslaught of criminals who will use the system for bad ends.

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Re: Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good
by Tim May 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

This guy's essay is really good. And it only took him a few minutes! > Originally published in TimBITS#602/22-Oct-01; see > <http://www.timbits.com/> for more information. > > Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good > by Tim May > > Steal this essay, or, why these sorts of essays represent the future of > all publishing. Hint: I'm not getting paid for them. > > "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." - A.J. Liebling > > If you or anyone you know has ever or will ever produce content > (writing, music, video, etc.) and hopes to get paid for it, you should > be afraid. > > To see why, start by downloading (for free, of course) one of the > numerous peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Aimster, LimeWire, > and eDonkey2000 that have emerged hydra-like to take the place of > Napster, whose head was cut off ..... --Tim May "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." --John Stuart Mill

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Re: Pay per use remailers and remailer reliability tracking.
by Steve Schear 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

At 04:51 PM 12/19/2001 -0800, Len Sassaman wrote: <snip> >"Digital cash" in the traditional sense isn't necessary for a pay-per-use >remailer system. Like MojoNation, I am going to refer to the digital cash >coins as something that has no monetary value in the traditional sense. >Tim pointed out at the last meeting that what we think of as "money" has >no inherent value. If you think of the remailer digital cash coins as >tokens with a very specific purpose, a lot of the objections to using >digital cash disappear. > >Additionally, I am assuming that there would be a suitable digital cash >algorithm that could be used for these purposes. I am aware that there are >algorithms similar to Chaum's in existence, but my level of knowledge >isn't sufficient to know if they would work for these purposes. In any >event, the Chaum patents expire soon enough. In this scheme, while the >anonymity of the token buyer is essential, neither the bank nor the seller >will have their anonymity protected. > > >The system would work as follows, from the point of view of the user: > >The user would purchase remailer tokens (digital cash) from a token vendor >(the bank). This is an exchange similar to car wash tokens or >TicketMaster[tm], where the seller receives "real cash" and the buyer >receives a tangible promise of a future service. The tokens could be >purchased online using PayPal, credit cards, etc. (Yes, this means the >number of paying remailer customers must be large enough to constitute a >crowd.) > >The user than fires up his remailer client, and each remailer has pricing >and token service information associated with its key and reliability >stats. (In this system, multiple token vendors could exist, and remailers >could be their own vendors. For simplicity's sake, I am going to assume >that all remailers in this user's client accept the same ticket vendor's >tokens.) > >Each remailer sets a price (i.e., number of tokens) for its use. Remailers >could even charge a different amount depending on where in the chain it >fell, with exit hop services costing more than beginning/middle chain >positions. The user would select his chain based on the reliability stats >and the pricing information for each remailer. The client would tally the >cost, and when the user approved, it would remove tokens from the user's >"purse" and attach them to the outgoing message, interwoven in the various >layers of encryption in the message. > >Now, from the remailer's point of view: > >A message is received, and the encryption stripped off. Inside is a >remailer token, which the remailer redeems with the token vendor after >ensuring that the token covered the price of the message (accumulating a >balance in his account, which can then be exchanged for cash by the >remop.) The message is then delivered to the next hop, and so forth. > > >I came up with this idea after an interesting conversation with Bram Cohen >one night, and then after researching it realized that others had said >basically the same thing. I'm interested in hearing problems with the >above proposal, but for now I am going to assume it is sound. I have a >further enhancement to this system that I just now realized might be >possible, and this is what I'm really interested in discussing. > >One of the big problems with remailers currently is reliability. We can >attempt to make remailer software more stable, place remailers on better, >faster systems, add message redundancy to the protocol, etc., and we still >don't eliminate the major flaw receipt verification. There is no way to >report back to a message sender that a message did not make delivery, so >when something does go wrong, the end user rarely has any idea why. Hal >Finney discussed this, and a possible solution to the problem, here: >http://nymip.velvet.com/pipermail/nymip-res-group/2001-August/000146.html If one assumes that delivery failures between remailers are the exception rather than the rule then remailers could publish delivery failure notifications in message pools (e.g., Usenet alt.anon.messages) encrypted with a sender provided key and subject line. The user's remailer client could then scan the group for the subject line to detect problems. >If a system as I have described above were to be implemented, we could >solve this problem (as well as the inevitable problems of remailers >cheating and collecting payment without delivering mail, and the problem >of double-spending) without having to reveal any useful information to an >attacker who doesn't already have ability to observe the entire mix >network. > >If the remailer client were to keep track of which tokens were paid to >which remailer, the user could determine where in a chain message delivery >failed, or if the message exited the last hop (not exactly the same as if >it was delivered, but close. The last remailer could cheat, or the >recipient's mail server could fail. There's ways to improve this, though.) > >After the remailer redeems the token with the token vendor, the token >vendor publishes the token. No one but the user and the remailer know >which message a given token was linked to, so information leakage is >minimized. The user can query the token vendor for the most recent token >redemptions, and will be able to determine where his message either is >currently waiting in the chain, or where it died. > >(This isn't exact either. Failure, in this case, is pinpointed at the link >between two remailers, rather than at a given remailer. If a user queried >the bank and discovered that, out of a 5 remailer chain, remailers A, B, >and C redeemed the tokens but D did not, this either means C is cheating, >C is broken on sending, or D is broken on receiving. Further tests would >be necessary to determine the exact nature of the failure.) > >Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Reasons why the payment system >would not work? Reasons why the verification system would not work? >Improvements to either system? Thoughts on the specifics of the digital >cash algorithms needed? One important aspect of preserving the efficacy of a bearer token based value system is fraud prevention. If the tokens are to be exchangeable for outside value (e.g., dollars) then there must be effective way to prevent the purchaser from defrauding the mint. There has been considerable debate on the "e-gold Discussion" <e-gold-list(a)talk.e-gold.com> list on the risks of accepting other payment forms for e-gold (which generally cannot be repudiated). One e-gold market maker, particularly stung by cheats, made some recommendations http://www.gold-age.net/ldf/ThemeStreamArticle-01-2001.html 'May Scale' of monetary hardness Hardness Item 1 Street cash, US dollars (Hard) 2 Street cash, euro currencies, japan 3 e-gold 4 Street cash, other regions 5 Interbank transfers of various sorts (wires etc), bank checks 6 personal checks 7 Consumer-level electronic account transfers (eg bPay) 8 Business-account-level retail transfer systems (Soft) 9 Paypal and similar 'new money' entities, beenz 10 Credit cards (Ridiculously soft) Observe that say stock brokerages definitely do not accept credit cards or paypal to fund an account. They will only accept instruments that are very hard, such as wire transfers or certified bank checks. When hard money is required, only money-types with a hardness of about 5 or better will do the job. Observe though that even money order and bank wires can and have been reversed.

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NEVER REPAY, FREE CASH GRANTS....... 13332
by b9414＠mail.ru 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

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Re: Pay per use remailers and remailer reliability tracking.
by mattd 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

>>A token-based remailer system, while an "obvious" system, would be a major accomplishment. --Tim May "As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." -- David Friedman A major target if "napstered".The best way to bring in the enormous systems required by crypto-anarchy is with AP protection.This is possible when AP is seen as the essential new back-up justice system it is.Not one of the "horsemen" or "extremely dark markets" Its mistaken for or misrepresented as.The problem timmy and david would clearly have with AP to their beloved "anarcho-capitalism" can be seen at... http://world.std.com/~mhuben/ddfr.html http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html and...http://world.std.com/~mhuben/cypher.html Yet AP remains the actual summit of anarcho-capitalism! Tim and david dont even believe their own arguments.

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Re: Axed Intel Man Loses E-Mail Case
by mattd 20 Dec '01

20 Dec '01

Sunder>>I'm afraid we wouldn't make a very good road show... True for me and you and all,Still I just luv the subject headline,conjures up delightful imagery.

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